I'd like to know by what right the FDA prevents the use of technological marvels (for several years) while countless people suffer and die in the interim.
Hooray! It only took a little more than a couple years to approve Mobile MIM! The FDA sure don't mess around! Kudos to it!
Such positive response to one of the most detestable bureaucracies makes me shiver.
Make no mistake: people are dying while they wait on the FDA to authorize their pursuit of happiness. The justification for the institution is as bogus as the war on drugs. The FDA does nothing that market forces, principled self-interest, and enforcement of existing fraud laws can't do and do more efficiently.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world and no one understands this better than the ill. It's a sick joke to use their protection as an excuse to prevent them and their doctors from exercising their own powers of thought and choice.
I work in a hospital and I had this same discussion with a co-worker today before I even heard of this story. Nurses, therapists, and doctors now have to walk around the hospital dragging a laptop suspended on a big cart or go to a work station. Our hospital is spending the money to put a work station in every patient room. I can't even imagine how much that is costing and it is taking years to implement. They could use iPads, give me a raise, and still significantly cut the cost of healthcare. I definitely see a day when everyone just carries a tablet (iPad or otherwise but hopefully iPad for the sake of my AAPL shares) and quickly and easily gets their documentation and ordering done. You can't imagine how many doctors already carry iPads around for quick reference of information. Most of them have iPhones also. In fact the first and only Samsung Galaxy tab I have seen was being carried by a doctor. This imaging software is just a start. I saw it when the iPad first came out and hoped Apple would get behind these kind of solutions. I am not one for catch phrases but in health care tablets are going to be game changers.
Just wait til you can "Bump" your iPhone or iPad with the doctor's device and transfer your records so you can keep them with you or have them transfer to a secure cloud-based storage environment.
Why do you think Apple is putting in the near field chips that is all over the rumor mills? It isn't just for your credit card numbers.
I'll take Apple's version of "Consumer Grade" anytime over the cheap, plastic junk that the other vendors spew out.
Easy there! Without a doubt its better than the screens on other brands.
Now that we got that out of the way, I'm still surprised you don't need more than 8 bits per color channel (there are certainly 10 and 12 bit-per-channel displays out there) for this type of application + some decent color calibration, which certainly isn't accessible in the standard Settings in any case.
Just wait til you can "Bump" your iPhone or iPad with the doctor's device and transfer your records so you can keep them with you or have them transfer to a secure cloud-based storage environment.
So many possibilities. Unlike the Samsung Nexus S I would expect NFC HW to accompany a usable app and probably an API for accessing the NFC.
For medical, a doctor could come in with their personal iPad and when they get near the passive chip in the wristband of the patient it sends the simple data of the patient’s ID to the device which then check the on-board databas or LAN database for chart info, which he can then look over and update as needed with text and/or audio. It would auto add his name and date without and inform him or a nurse immediately if a drug interaction or procedure was in conflict. Hospitals could service more people, faster, and with less incident thus saving more lives and risking less in malpractice… potentially.
Easy there! Without a doubt its better than the screens on other brands.
Now that we got that out of the way, I'm still surprised you don't need more than 8 bits per color channel (there are certainly 10 and 12 bit-per-channel displays out there) for this type of application + some decent color calibration, which certainly isn't accessible in the standard Settings in any case.
Interesting, but if you had a spectrum consisting of 255 shades of red, samples three or four apart would be indistinguishable, certainly for all intents and purposes, to the human eye wouldn't they?
My point is that this is a story about an approval by the FDA of an app. Not FCC approval of the iPhone or iPad. Perhaps some are congratulating Apple for being to support such an app; I am trying draw the distinction between the hardware and the software.
Apple didn't "do" anything really. They just build high-quality, usable products that anyone can use and developers see the capabilities to capitalize on it.
When the iPad came out and people were criticizing it for just being a big iPod Touch/iPhone, I immediately saw the iPad as a killer-product for the healthcare industry.
Agreed. Apple is on the high end of consumer grade. Further, if the iPhone is any indication of where the iPad screen quality is eventually going, the quality will soon be even more amazing.
Further, I suspect the original poster lacks understanding how medical images such as X-Rays are usually viewed and the iPad's potential. Not always, but generally X-Rays are not displayed on a computer screen. The film is essentially placed in a light table whereby the light illuminates the film. In such cases, the iPad is a better method for three reasons, 1) it is cheaper then the light tables, 2) the X-Ray can be manipulated easier to focus in on an area (think of the iPad's pinch and zoom features), and 3) the lightening on the iPad can be changed to suit the needs of the viewer.
Also, using an iPad allows people to view medial images such as the X-Rays sooner as they can be send to the device via Wi-FI as opposed to a Dr. having to wait for image or have to go to a see station to view it. In addition, the iPad has the potential to bring health care cost down.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sflocal
I'll take Apple's version of "Consumer Grade" anytime over the cheap, plastic junk that the other vendors spew out.
It only take 1 app to be written and approved before everyone jumps on the bandwagon - and that is not a bad thing at all. Showing a patient their scan on an iPhone or iPad is a quantum leap for all.
My point is that this is a story about an approval by the FDA of an app. Not FCC approval of the iPhone or iPad. Perhaps some are congratulating Apple for being to support such an app; I am trying draw the distinction between the hardware and the software.
Without the hardware, there would be no software. And without the software there would be no FDA.
If that's not obvious, I don't know what to say....
You are probably generally right. Sometimes, however, Apple actually does lend particular developer's hands on support. Take for instance Apple recently supporting Cherokee as a language on iOs devices. Apple will often times change APIs and its developer tools if an important developer needs changes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sflocal
Apple didn't "do" anything really. They just build high-quality, usable products that anyone can use and developers see the capabilities to capitalize on it.
When the iPad came out and people were criticizing it for just being a big iPod Touch/iPhone, I immediately saw the iPad as a killer-product for the healthcare industry.
I'd like to know by what right the FDA prevents the use of technological marvels (for several years) while countless people suffer and die in the interim.
Hooray! It only took a little more than a couple years to approve Mobile MIM! The FDA sure don't mess around! Kudos to it!
Such positive response to one of the most detestable bureaucracies makes me shiver.
Make no mistake: people are dying while they wait on the FDA to authorize their pursuit of happiness. The justification for the institution is as bogus as the war on drugs. The FDA does nothing that market forces, principled self-interest, and enforcement of existing fraud laws can't do and do more efficiently.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world and no one understands this better than the ill. It's a sick joke to use their protection as an excuse to prevent them and their doctors from exercising their own powers of thought and choice.
It is shameful.
With all due respect, you'll be the first person to sue the FDA if goes terribly wrong, making the argument for something having been rushed to market.
Without the hardware, there would be no software. And without the software there would be no FDA.
If that's not obvious, I don't know what to say....
I can appreciate the symbiotic relationship between software and hardware. I am "sure" that app developers will be congratulated just as vociferously when the iPad2 comes out.
My point was through my original comment there had been 20 mentions of Apple/iPhone/iPod. 0 for MIM (excluding your reference to "the folks involved").
Can you expand on your comment that "without the software there would be no FDA.". This is not obvious to me. The FDA has been around for much longer than software has.
I'd like to know by what right the FDA prevents the use of technological marvels (for several years) while countless people suffer and die in the interim.
Hooray! It only took a little more than a couple years to approve Mobile MIM! The FDA sure don't mess around! Kudos to it!
Such positive response to one of the most detestable bureaucracies makes me shiver.
Make no mistake: people are dying while they wait on the FDA to authorize their pursuit of happiness. The justification for the institution is as bogus as the war on drugs. The FDA does nothing that market forces, principled self-interest, and enforcement of existing fraud laws can't do and do more efficiently.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world and no one understands this better than the ill. It's a sick joke to use their protection as an excuse to prevent them and their doctors from exercising their own powers of thought and choice.
It is shameful.
If you don't know where the FDA gets its mandates from; or how it works, you shouldn't be making hyperbolic statements.
Market forces gave us the housing bubble, the internet bubble, the Great Depression, pollution. The diagnosis on market forces are not good. Principled self-interest is an oxymoron. Like James Madison said, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. "
Can you expand on your comment that "without the software there would be no FDA.". This is not obvious to me. The FDA has been around for much longer than software has.
It's obvious when you read things in context.
(I.e., I was referring to this app, not 'software' in general or the 'FDA' in general.)
Interesting, but if you had a spectrum consisting of 255 shades of red, samples three or four apart would be indistinguishable, certainly for all intents and purposes, to the human eye wouldn't they?
No, it's definitely not indistinguishable depending on the width of the band or color. Assuming a reasonably well calibrated monitor, you can certainly see banding in some 24-bit color images on similar-color-gradients (and I just did a quick 4 band image with red varied by just 1 level between each section as a double-check in PS, and yes, you can see the bands). 3-4 steps apart would be very apparent.
You can see the difference when rendering to 16 bits per channel vs 8 bits per channel on certain types of output (sometimes you'll do a 16-bit per channel and then dither it down to 24 or 16 bit color to avoid seeing banding), but again, maybe this medical software lets you select ranges in the original images to 'expand' across the 256 levels to enhance visibility (no need to try and just preserve the original xray or whatever - it's a computer, so let it enhance it, right?). Or maybe the originals are only 8 bits per color anyway. Or they dither it. Or... maybe it's just good enough for these images, even if you'd work with more depth for some graphics work.
I'm stunned that a consumer-grade display is good enough for doing medical diagnosis work. I wonder if there's some funky display calibration that the software has built in to make sure everything in those images is displayed with a usable color balance / gamma / brightness.
The FDA may have approved this but doctors can choose any method they like to diagnose conditions. It is more about malpractice insurance. We've been examining X-rays over the Internet for years.
So about the screen. When taking X-ray you want to minimize the dosage so you never want to capture a larger image than you need. The latest high tech X-rays are digital, no film. 3D digital imaging allows for detailed analysis from multiple views and slices. The largest high resolution X-ray we have is 170 mm x 170 mm at 80 micrometer resolution. That is roughly 7" x 7" at 300 dpi for those using the Imperial system. So as you can see, if a doctor wanted to zoom in and pan around, the iPad would allow viewing the image at a greater magnification than the resolution of the captured data. As far as the image detail is concerned, the original captured data is only 13 bit grayscale so again the iPad has much greater color gamut than needed for this type of work.
I'd like to know by what right the FDA prevents the use of technological marvels (for several years) while countless people suffer and die in the interim.
Hooray! It only took a little more than a couple years to approve Mobile MIM! The FDA sure don't mess around! Kudos to it!
Such positive response to one of the most detestable bureaucracies makes me shiver.
Make no mistake: people are dying while they wait on the FDA to authorize their pursuit of happiness. The justification for the institution is as bogus as the war on drugs. The FDA does nothing that market forces, principled self-interest, and enforcement of existing fraud laws can't do and do more efficiently.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world and no one understands this better than the ill. It's a sick joke to use their protection as an excuse to prevent them and their doctors from exercising their own powers of thought and choice.
It is shameful.
Your comments prove that you have no understanding of why the FDA was created to begin with.
Comments
Hooray! It only took a little more than a couple years to approve Mobile MIM! The FDA sure don't mess around! Kudos to it!
Such positive response to one of the most detestable bureaucracies makes me shiver.
Make no mistake: people are dying while they wait on the FDA to authorize their pursuit of happiness. The justification for the institution is as bogus as the war on drugs. The FDA does nothing that market forces, principled self-interest, and enforcement of existing fraud laws can't do and do more efficiently.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world and no one understands this better than the ill. It's a sick joke to use their protection as an excuse to prevent them and their doctors from exercising their own powers of thought and choice.
It is shameful.
Brian
Just wait til you can "Bump" your iPhone or iPad with the doctor's device and transfer your records so you can keep them with you or have them transfer to a secure cloud-based storage environment.
Why do you think Apple is putting in the near field chips that is all over the rumor mills? It isn't just for your credit card numbers.
Brian
I'll take Apple's version of "Consumer Grade" anytime over the cheap, plastic junk that the other vendors spew out.
Easy there!
Now that we got that out of the way, I'm still surprised you don't need more than 8 bits per color channel (there are certainly 10 and 12 bit-per-channel displays out there) for this type of application + some decent color calibration, which certainly isn't accessible in the standard Settings in any case.
Just wait til you can "Bump" your iPhone or iPad with the doctor's device and transfer your records so you can keep them with you or have them transfer to a secure cloud-based storage environment.
So many possibilities. Unlike the Samsung Nexus S I would expect NFC HW to accompany a usable app and probably an API for accessing the NFC.
For medical, a doctor could come in with their personal iPad and when they get near the passive chip in the wristband of the patient it sends the simple data of the patient’s ID to the device which then check the on-board databas or LAN database for chart info, which he can then look over and update as needed with text and/or audio. It would auto add his name and date without and inform him or a nurse immediately if a drug interaction or procedure was in conflict. Hospitals could service more people, faster, and with less incident thus saving more lives and risking less in malpractice… potentially.
Easy there!
Now that we got that out of the way, I'm still surprised you don't need more than 8 bits per color channel (there are certainly 10 and 12 bit-per-channel displays out there) for this type of application + some decent color calibration, which certainly isn't accessible in the standard Settings in any case.
Interesting, but if you had a spectrum consisting of 255 shades of red, samples three or four apart would be indistinguishable, certainly for all intents and purposes, to the human eye wouldn't they?
Excuse me?
My point is that this is a story about an approval by the FDA of an app. Not FCC approval of the iPhone or iPad. Perhaps some are congratulating Apple for being to support such an app; I am trying draw the distinction between the hardware and the software.
Apple didn't "do" anything really. They just build high-quality, usable products that anyone can use and developers see the capabilities to capitalize on it.
When the iPad came out and people were criticizing it for just being a big iPod Touch/iPhone, I immediately saw the iPad as a killer-product for the healthcare industry.
It's going to be huge!
i hope they make an ad free version.
Further, I suspect the original poster lacks understanding how medical images such as X-Rays are usually viewed and the iPad's potential. Not always, but generally X-Rays are not displayed on a computer screen. The film is essentially placed in a light table whereby the light illuminates the film. In such cases, the iPad is a better method for three reasons, 1) it is cheaper then the light tables, 2) the X-Ray can be manipulated easier to focus in on an area (think of the iPad's pinch and zoom features), and 3) the lightening on the iPad can be changed to suit the needs of the viewer.
Also, using an iPad allows people to view medial images such as the X-Rays sooner as they can be send to the device via Wi-FI as opposed to a Dr. having to wait for image or have to go to a see station to view it. In addition, the iPad has the potential to bring health care cost down.
I'll take Apple's version of "Consumer Grade" anytime over the cheap, plastic junk that the other vendors spew out.
My point is that this is a story about an approval by the FDA of an app. Not FCC approval of the iPhone or iPad. Perhaps some are congratulating Apple for being to support such an app; I am trying draw the distinction between the hardware and the software.
Without the hardware, there would be no software. And without the software there would be no FDA.
If that's not obvious, I don't know what to say....
Apple didn't "do" anything really. They just build high-quality, usable products that anyone can use and developers see the capabilities to capitalize on it.
When the iPad came out and people were criticizing it for just being a big iPod Touch/iPhone, I immediately saw the iPad as a killer-product for the healthcare industry.
It's going to be huge!
I'd like to know by what right the FDA prevents the use of technological marvels (for several years) while countless people suffer and die in the interim.
Hooray! It only took a little more than a couple years to approve Mobile MIM! The FDA sure don't mess around! Kudos to it!
Such positive response to one of the most detestable bureaucracies makes me shiver.
Make no mistake: people are dying while they wait on the FDA to authorize their pursuit of happiness. The justification for the institution is as bogus as the war on drugs. The FDA does nothing that market forces, principled self-interest, and enforcement of existing fraud laws can't do and do more efficiently.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world and no one understands this better than the ill. It's a sick joke to use their protection as an excuse to prevent them and their doctors from exercising their own powers of thought and choice.
It is shameful.
With all due respect, you'll be the first person to sue the FDA if goes terribly wrong, making the argument for something having been rushed to market.
Without the hardware, there would be no software. And without the software there would be no FDA.
If that's not obvious, I don't know what to say....
I can appreciate the symbiotic relationship between software and hardware. I am "sure" that app developers will be congratulated just as vociferously when the iPad2 comes out.
My point was through my original comment there had been 20 mentions of Apple/iPhone/iPod. 0 for MIM (excluding your reference to "the folks involved").
Can you expand on your comment that "without the software there would be no FDA.". This is not obvious to me. The FDA has been around for much longer than software has.
I'd like to know by what right the FDA prevents the use of technological marvels (for several years) while countless people suffer and die in the interim.
Hooray! It only took a little more than a couple years to approve Mobile MIM! The FDA sure don't mess around! Kudos to it!
Such positive response to one of the most detestable bureaucracies makes me shiver.
Make no mistake: people are dying while they wait on the FDA to authorize their pursuit of happiness. The justification for the institution is as bogus as the war on drugs. The FDA does nothing that market forces, principled self-interest, and enforcement of existing fraud laws can't do and do more efficiently.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world and no one understands this better than the ill. It's a sick joke to use their protection as an excuse to prevent them and their doctors from exercising their own powers of thought and choice.
It is shameful.
If you don't know where the FDA gets its mandates from; or how it works, you shouldn't be making hyperbolic statements.
Market forces gave us the housing bubble, the internet bubble, the Great Depression, pollution. The diagnosis on market forces are not good. Principled self-interest is an oxymoron. Like James Madison said, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. "
Can you expand on your comment that "without the software there would be no FDA.". This is not obvious to me. The FDA has been around for much longer than software has.
It's obvious when you read things in context.
(I.e., I was referring to this app, not 'software' in general or the 'FDA' in general.)
Interesting, but if you had a spectrum consisting of 255 shades of red, samples three or four apart would be indistinguishable, certainly for all intents and purposes, to the human eye wouldn't they?
No, it's definitely not indistinguishable depending on the width of the band or color. Assuming a reasonably well calibrated monitor, you can certainly see banding in some 24-bit color images on similar-color-gradients (and I just did a quick 4 band image with red varied by just 1 level between each section as a double-check in PS, and yes, you can see the bands). 3-4 steps apart would be very apparent.
You can see the difference when rendering to 16 bits per channel vs 8 bits per channel on certain types of output (sometimes you'll do a 16-bit per channel and then dither it down to 24 or 16 bit color to avoid seeing banding), but again, maybe this medical software lets you select ranges in the original images to 'expand' across the 256 levels to enhance visibility (no need to try and just preserve the original xray or whatever - it's a computer, so let it enhance it, right?). Or maybe the originals are only 8 bits per color anyway. Or they dither it. Or... maybe it's just good enough for these images, even if you'd work with more depth for some graphics work.
I'm stunned that a consumer-grade display is good enough for doing medical diagnosis work. I wonder if there's some funky display calibration that the software has built in to make sure everything in those images is displayed with a usable color balance / gamma / brightness.
The FDA may have approved this but doctors can choose any method they like to diagnose conditions. It is more about malpractice insurance. We've been examining X-rays over the Internet for years.
So about the screen. When taking X-ray you want to minimize the dosage so you never want to capture a larger image than you need. The latest high tech X-rays are digital, no film. 3D digital imaging allows for detailed analysis from multiple views and slices. The largest high resolution X-ray we have is 170 mm x 170 mm at 80 micrometer resolution. That is roughly 7" x 7" at 300 dpi for those using the Imperial system. So as you can see, if a doctor wanted to zoom in and pan around, the iPad would allow viewing the image at a greater magnification than the resolution of the captured data. As far as the image detail is concerned, the original captured data is only 13 bit grayscale so again the iPad has much greater color gamut than needed for this type of work.
I'd like to know by what right the FDA prevents the use of technological marvels (for several years) while countless people suffer and die in the interim.
Hooray! It only took a little more than a couple years to approve Mobile MIM! The FDA sure don't mess around! Kudos to it!
Such positive response to one of the most detestable bureaucracies makes me shiver.
Make no mistake: people are dying while they wait on the FDA to authorize their pursuit of happiness. The justification for the institution is as bogus as the war on drugs. The FDA does nothing that market forces, principled self-interest, and enforcement of existing fraud laws can't do and do more efficiently.
Nothing is guaranteed in this world and no one understands this better than the ill. It's a sick joke to use their protection as an excuse to prevent them and their doctors from exercising their own powers of thought and choice.
It is shameful.
Your comments prove that you have no understanding of why the FDA was created to begin with.